Cargo planes flew over the city, manned by the parachute regiment, dropping leaflets: The new tomorrow has arrived.
Out in the country, the leaflets caught in the trees, settled on hedges, and blew along the laneways. Some landed on the rivers and were carried downstream. I brought them to the elders and read them aloud: Citizens of Gypsy Origin, Come Join Us. The farmers no longer cal ed us a pestilence. They addressed us by our formal names. We listened to a radio program with Romani music: our own harps and strings. We sang new songs, Conka and I, and hundreds of people came down the roadways to listen. Photographers with movie cameras pul ed up in jeeps and motorcars. We waved the red flag, looked down the road into the future.
I had hope right up until the end. It was the old Romani habit of hoping. Perhaps I have never lost it.
Many years later, I was to walk up the granite steps and pass the fluted columns of the National Theater, in a new pair of shoes and a black lace blouse with patterned leaves, where I listened to Martin Stränsky read my own song aloud. You do not know what you are hearing when you hear something for the first time, daughter, but you listen to it as though you wil never hear it again. The theater held its breath. He had little music in him, Stränsky, for a poet, but afterwards the crowd stood and cheered, and a spotlight swung around on me. I hid from it, sucking on stray ends of my hair, until Stränsky put his fingers to my chin and tilted it upwards, the applause growing louder: poets, council members, workers, al waving program sheets in the air. The Englishman, Swann, stood in the wings of the theater, looking out at me, his green eyes, his light-colored hair.
I was taken to the inner courtyard where huge wooden tables were laid out with an assortment of wine and vodka, fruit, and bowls of cheese. A flurry of formal speeches.
Al hail to a literate proletariat!
It is our revolutionary right to reclaim the written word!
Citizens, we must listen to the deep roots of our Roma brothers!
I was guided through the crowd, so many people pushing towards me, extending their hands, and I could hear my own skirts swishing, yes, more than anything I could hear the sound of cloth against cloth as I went out into the quiet of the street, it was one of the happiest times I remember, daughter. From inside the theater I could stil hear the hum from the people, they were on our side, I hadn't heard anything quite like it before. I walked out in the cool air. A sheen of light was on the puddles, and night birds arced under the streetlamps. I stood there in the silence and it seemed to me that the spring of my life had come.
I was a poet.
I had written things down.
England-Czechoslovakia
1930s-1959
THE ROOM WHERE I LIE is smal but has a window to what has become an intimate patch of sky. The blue of daytime seems ordinary, but on clear nights it is made obvious, as if for the first time, that the wheel of the world is not fixed: the evening star spends a tantalizing few moments hung in the frame.
The shril gabble of birds on the rooftops comes in odd rhythms and, from the street below, I can almost hear the engine of my motorbike ticking.
The rattle of the road is stil in my body: one final corner and the bike rol ed out from underneath me. Strange to watch the sparks rising from the tarmac. I slid along, then smashed into a low stone wal . In the hospital they did not have enough bandages to make a cast—they splinted my leg and sent me home.
I have given up searching, but it is impossible to think that she is gone, that I wil never see her again, or catch the sound of her, the grain of her voice.
Just before the accident, near Piest any, a raw gust of February wind blew off my scarf. It snagged on a row of barbed-wire fencing by a military range, fluttering there a moment before fal ing to the ground. Zoli gave me the scarf years ago, but I could see no way of retrieving it and feared what might happen if I tried to climb the fence. The scarf blew back and forth, like most everything else, just beyond my reach.
Thirty-four years old—a shattered kneecap, a heap of overcoats, a pile of unfinished translations on the table. From the hal way comes the squeaking of floorboards and the soft slap of dominoes. I can hear the mops dipping in bleach, the keys in the door, the incantations of solitary men and women home from work. Christ, I'm no better than al those numberless mumblers of Ave Marias—how I used to hate confessionals as a child, those dark Liverpudlian priests sliding back the gril , bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been how many decades since my last confession?
My father once said that you can't gauge the contents of a man's heart by his greatest act of evil alone, but if that's true then it must also be true that you can't judge him without it: mine was committed on a freezing winter afternoon at the printing mil on Godrova Street, when I stood with Zoli Novotna and betrayed her against the hum of the machinery. Since I've done little worse, or measurably better, in the days before or since then, I'm forced to admit that my legacy to the world may very wel be this one solitary thing that's with me now almost every breathing moment.
There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tel them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shel or the shock—perhaps that's me, or perhaps I must tel it before it's forgotten or becomes, like everything else, something else.
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it's stil impossible to land exactly where we took off. My mother was a nurse from Ireland, my father a dockworker from Slovakia. Mam hailed from a little seaside vil age in Donegal. She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and al human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea. My father emigrated to Britain in the early years of the century when he changed his last name to Swann, but didn't alter his soul; in later years he described himself as a Communist, a pacifist, and a Catholic in no particular order.
Home from the docklands, he used to put a dark thumbprint on the bread in order that I would know where it came from.
From a young age I was hooked on the plot of my father's homeland. We sat together on crates in the coalshed searching the radio bands. In the laneway behind, my friends played footbal . My father spent hours trying to tune in to the long-wave broadcasts from Bratislava, Kosice, Prague, while the bal thumped against the wal . Only at odd moments did the weather al ow the radio a crackle from the beyond—we leaned forward and our heads touched. He wrote it down and later translated for me. At night, my prayers were in his native tongue.
When the Second World War struck, it didn't seem at al unusual that he took off to join the partisans in the Czechoslo-vakian mountains—he said he wanted to become a medic and that he'd carry stretchers, that wars were useless and God was democratic, and, with that in mind, he'd return shortly. He left me his wristwatch and a copy of Engels in the Slovak language. I found out, years later, that he had become an expert with dynamite; his specialty was blowing up bridges. The news that he had died in an ambush came in a two-line telegram. My mother wilted away. She took me on a trip back to Donegal for a week, but for whatever reason it was not the same place that she had left behind. “Nobody lives where they grew up anymore,” she said to me shortly before she died.